"Wars will
diminish in proportion as the arts progress." (prediction by The
American Institute, a society for the promotion of commerce, awarding Colt a
medal in 1837)

"Men are only
as good as their technical development allows them to be."

George Orwell

Inside the Whale and other
essays

"A gentleman armed with my
invention can keep a dozen ruffians at bay."

Samuel Colt

"it’s a Wonderful thing.
Wireless is coming to mankind in its full meaning like a hurricane, some of
these days…."

Nikola Tesla

"The Church welcomes
technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact
that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to
Him."

Pope Pius XII (Christmas message
1953)

"If you'll accept my notion that
technology may be the most advanced , extreme, and brilliant creation of the
Devil-for technology, of course, does incredible things-then you get a real
sense of why some people would be more leagued with the Devil than devoted to
God. Half the human universe must by now be on the side of technology."

-Norman Mailer New York
Magazine, Oct 18,2007

"Technology....is a queer thing. It
brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the
other."

-C.P. Snow, New York Times
1971

"I have no doubt that it is
possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that
shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the
actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go
for gigantism is to go for self-destruction."

E.F. Schumacher

Small is Beautiful

"The point is that if you
measure the progress of technology by Mips and bytes but by how it affects
people’s lives and their ability to get useful work done, you realize that the
last thirty years have been a time not of unexpected achievement but of
persistent disappointment."

Paul Krugman

The accidental Theorist

"One must point out, however,
that many who now deplore the oppression, injustice, and intrinsic ugliness of
life in a technically advanced and congested society will decide that things
were better when they were worse; and they will discover that to do without the
functions proper to the great systems-without telephone, electric light, car,
letters, telegrams-is all very well for a week or so, but that it is not amusing
as a way of life."

Roberto Vacca

The Coming Dark Age

"The human mind, in taking us
down the path of technocracy, has become the adversary of life itself and
collaterally the adversary of the human soul."

Konrad Lorenz

The Waning of Humanness

"For those of you who’ve
been living in a cave or are understandably overwhelmed by info over-load,
nanotechnology is the inexpensive and complete control over the structure of
matter. It’s the manipulation of matter, molecule by molecule. The advent of
nanotechnology will result in the human ability to create limitless amounts of
any substance consistent with the laws of the Universe."

Timothy Leary

Design for Dying

"In the Utrecht Psalter,
illuminated near Rheims around 830 , there is an illustration of Psalm 63 which
gives technological advantage to those on the side of God. The army of the
righteous confront a much larger army of the ungodly. "In each camp a sword
is being sharpened conspicuously. The Evildoers are content to use an old
fashioned whetstone. The Godly, however, are employing the first grindstone
known anywhere. Obviously the artist is telling us that technological advance is
God’s will."

David F. Noble

The Religion of Technology *

"It is one of the most amazing
facts of Western Cultural history, that the striking acceleration and
intensification of technological development in Post-Carolingian Europe emanated
from contemplative monasticism."

Ernst Benz

"…..A thousand years in the
making, the religion of technology has become the common enchantment, not only
of the designers of technology but also of those caught up in, and undone by,
their godly designs. The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever
the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy,
reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian
yearning for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally
indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspired
an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while
diverting attention from more urgent concerns. Thus, unrestrained technological
development is allowed to proceed apace, without serious scrutiny or
oversight-without reason. Pleas for some rationality, for reflection about pace
and purpose, for sober assessments of costs and benefits-for evidence even of
economic value, much less larger social gains-are dismissed as irrational. From
within the faith, any and all criticism appears irrelevant, and
irreverent."

David Noble

The Religion of Technology *

"RFID will have a pervasive impact
on every aspect of civilization, much the same way the printing press, the
industrial revolution and the Internet and personal computers have transformed
society.....RFID is a big deal. Its impact will be pervasive, personal and
profound. It will be the biggest deal since Edison gave us the light bulb."

-Rick Duris

Frontline Solutions Magazine,
Dec 2003

"To its credit, the
RFID industry is very twenty-first century, and therefore a little cagier than
the pesticide biz in the 1950s. Realizing that they had a world-shattering
technical breakthrough at hand, they hired a top-notch public relations firm
first to go fish in the waters of public acceptance. Acceptance of what,
exactly? Basically, acceptance of what this book describes in detail: an
amazingly ambitious scheme to infest the entire physical infrastructure of the
planet with spray-on global blanket of Internet interactivity. This is truly a
fabulous, earth-shaking scheme. It is awesome."

Katherine Albrecht & Liz McIntyre

SpyChips

"We have extended our central
nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far
as our planet is concerned."

Marshall McLuhan

Understanding Media (1968)

"There is in our future a TV
or internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of
citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People."

Umberto Eco

"The telescreen received
and transmitted simultaneously….There was no way of knowing whether you were
being watched at any given moment."

George Orwell

1984

"In their elite obeisance and
service to established power, the Twentieth-century proponents of the religion
of technology have out-done their predecessors."

David F. Noble

The Religion of Technology

"For something has happened in
America that is strange and dangerous, and there is only a dull and even stupid
awareness of what it is-in part because it has no name. I call it Technopoly."

Neil Postman

Technopoly*

"….In fact, most people
believe that technology is a staunch friend. There are two reasons for this.
First, technology is a friend. It makes life easier, cleaner, and longer. Can
anyone ask more of a friend? Second, because of its lengthy, intimate, and
inevitable relationship with culture, technology does not invite a close
examination of its consequences. It is the kind of friend that asks for trust
and obedience which most people are inclined to give because its gifts are truly
bountiful. But, of course, there is a dark side to this friend. Its gifts are
not without a heavy cost. Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can
be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of
our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines
certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.
Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy."

Neil Postman

Ibid

"Chaos is upon us….every
single stable power relationship is going to be called into question by
cyberspace."

John Perry Barlow

"A thinking machine? Was
the Chess-Player such a creation?....A thinking machine! Was such a thing
really conceivable?"

-Joseph Friedrich Freiherr zu
Racknitz, 1789

"Could a machine think? -could
it be in pain?-Well, is the human body to be called such a machine? It surely
comes as close as possible to being such a machine.

But a machine surely
cannot think!-Is that an empirical statement? No. We only say of human being and
what is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls and no doubt of spirits
too."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Investigations, 1953

"It would seem that the logic
of success in this matter is the ultimate requirement of the work force from the
scene of toil…..it does not follow that we are prepared to accept the
consequences."

Marshall McCluhan (commenting on
the computer chip)

"There is no industrial
precedent for what is happening today, no prior experience upon which to draw,
no comforting historical rules of operation to fall back on. In this century,
nothing can measure up to the impact of the microchip: Not television, not the
automobile, and so far not even gene-splicing. Microtectronics, a manufacturing
process as technically exacting as brain surgery, as intellectually demanding as
atomic physics, yields products that contain the power of logic, products that
reason."

Dirk Hanson

The New Alchemists

"Our system today
paradoxically generates stupendous wealth alongside even more stupendous want,
poverty and waste. The Technological revolution, in its current context, only
quickens the pace of planet Earth’s rush to disaster, or rather to the fork in
the road on the world history line where we must and will make a decision of
life and death consequences for civilization as we know it. Time is running out
for a world order based on ever-concentrating corporate ownership of wealth and
driven primarily by the needs of profit. Technology can be used effectively to
take us into an age of barbarism that will make fascism look like an exercise in
Charity and human progress.

But that same revolution equips us
with a means to tackle this problem rationally, that is socially; to move beyond
the blind corporate drive for profit into a world of awareness, information,
knowledge, empowerment, imagination, cooperation, commitment, and freedom."

Phil Courneyeur

"The superlatives to describe
the changes underway are never-ending-tectonic shifts, revolutionary changes, a
new paradigm, a Tsunami of transformation (all adding up to a Tsunami of
superlatives). Such extreme characterizations don’t arise because the world
has acquired a new taste for hyperbole, rather the language flows from the
attempts of baffled business leaders, boggled academics, and amazed journalists
to somehow characterize the world we are entering and how the changes underway
are unlike anything before."

Don Tapscott

The Digital Economy

"Early in the next millennium
your right and left cufflinks or earrings may communicate with each other by
low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your
telephone won’t ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps
respond to your incoming calls like a well trained English butler. Schools will
change to become more like museums and playground for children to assemble ideas
and socialize with children all over the world. The digital planet will look and
feel like the head of a pin."

Nicholas Negoponte

"By means of electricity, the
world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a
breathless point of time….The round globe is a vast….brainy instinct with
intelligence."

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)

(analysts have estimated the
financial impact of software bugs is 60 billion a year, and maybe much
more...Research Triangle Institute of Research Triangle Park, N.C.)

"The upheavals of the early
‘90s-process reengineering, downsizing, and PC proliferation-were a tea party
compared with what’s coming next. Capitalism is about to be completely
reinvented. As the ice age of the old economy comes to an end, cracks widen in
the fault lines of crumbling business models. Intuition and creativity will
blossom in organizations rooted in the fertile soil of the new media."

David Ticoll (President of the
Alliance for Converging Technologies)

"However far modern science
and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught
mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible."

Lewis Mumford

Technics and Civilization

"By his very success in
inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom
that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever
fathomed."

Lewis Mumford

The conduct of Life

"In the past the man has been
first; in the future the system must be first"

-Frederick Winslow Taylor 1911

"Technology insulates and
isolates. While technology seems to bring us together, it does so only by making
new ways of separating us from one another, the "One World" of
Americans in the future will be a world of millions of private compartments. The
progression from the intimately jostling horse-drawn carriage to the railroad
car to the encapsulated lone automobile rider and then to the seat-belted
airplane passenger who cannot converse with his seatmate because they are both
wearing earphones for the recorded music. The progression from the parent
reading aloud to the children to the living theatre with living audiences to the
darkened motion-picture house to the home of private televisions sets, each
twinkling in a different room for a different member of the family-these are the
natural progressions of technology, the cellular car phone isolates us from the
traffic, the walkman carries our private world as we jog. The multiplying cable
stations make even television an increasingly personalized experience. All of us
are in danger of being suffocated by our own tastes. Moreover, these devices
that enlarge our sight and vision in space seem somehow to imprison us in the
present. The electronic technology that reaches out instantaneously over the
continents does very little to help us cross the centuries."

Daniel J. Boorstin

Hidden History

See article" The
Brightest Star….from Space the Web appears as a swirling sphere of light.
By george Gilder

Forbes ASAP Oct 4, 1999

"As nuclear and other
technological achievements continue to mount, the normal life span will continue
to climb. The hourly productivity of the worker will increase. How is the
increase in leisure time and the extension of life expectancy to be spent? Will
it be for the achievement of man’s better aspirations or his degradation to
the level of a well-fed, well-kept slave of an all-powerful state? Indeed,
merely to state that question sharply reminds us that in these days and in the
years ahead the need for philosophers and theologians parallels the need for
scientists and engineers."

Dwight David Eisenhower

"The economic and
technological triumphs of the past few years have not solved as many problems as
we thought they would, and, in fact, have brought us new problems we did not
foresee."